Saturday, October 27, 2007

Hard Road West

I've been reading Hard Road West: History and Geology along the Gold Rush Trail by Keith Heyer Meldahl. If you are interested in the mountains west from the Rockies, you need to read this book. The jacket blurb mentions John McPhee, but this is a very different book from McPhee's geology series. McPhee is a superior prose stylist who seeks to distill his encounters with the landscape and its professional observers into concise, striking, almost choppy prose. Meldahl is a less refined writer, but his geology is detailed, leisurely, brimming with a enthusiasm for the rocks that contrasts with McPhee's almost clinical detachment. In spirit — not in style — Meldhal reminds me of Stegner's John Wesley Powell biography Beyond the Hundredth Meridian. There's a sense of place, a love for a harsh landscape in both books that are very powerful in these two books.

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About Me

I am VP and Engineering Fellow at Google, where I lead work on natural-language understanding and machine learning. My previous positions include chair of the Computer and Information Science department of the University of Pennsylvania, head of the Machine Learning and Information Retrieval department at AT&T Labs, and research and management positions at SRI International. I received a Ph.D. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Edinburgh in 1982, and I have over 120 research publications on computational linguistics, machine learning, bioinformatics, speech recognition, and logic programming, as well as several patents. I was elected AAAI Fellow in 1991 for contributions to computational linguistics and logic programming, ACM Fellow in 2010 for contributions to machine-learning models of natural language and biological sequences, and ACL Fellow in 2017 for contributions to sequence modeling, finite-state methods, and dependency and deductive parsing. I was president of the Association for Computational Linguistics in 1993.